Welcome! Gibson Consulting's oil pages are being revised. Please explore for the topic you want using the menu system above. This work is in progress, so please bear with me (I don't get paid for doing this!). I'm adding more Q & A and will be updating information as possible (winter-spring 2010), but every topic on the drop-down menus will not have an entry for while. If you really liked the old cumbersome multi-colored disorganized page, go here.

By Richard Gibson: What Things Are Made OfThe story of America's dependency on mineral commodities (including oil) in everyday life. Buy the book. Print (312 pages): $17.95; electronic (PDF) $9.99. Additional e-versions details to come.visit the blog

In the time it takes most people to read this sentence, the world will have used up (forever) about 8,000 barrels of oil - 336,000 gallons; at 1000 barrels per second, it's going fast.Great Article

OIL IMPORT QUIZ

What country provides the single largest volume of the US's oil imports (2001-2009)?

Note about graphics: The large graphical images normally appearing on these pages may have been temporarily removed because the site is about to reach its bandwidth limit. In part this is caused by forums and other pages stealing bandwidth by directly linking to the images - PLEASE DO NOT LINK DIRECTLY TO THESE IMAGES. We encourage you to cut and paste individual images rather than linking directly to them; permission is granted for this use for the images to which I own copyright - but wholesale copying of the page and portraying as your own is NOT granted. We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your interest greatly, and the graphics should return soon.

You are welcome to use any of the information on this Gibson Consulting
Oil Statistics page - but it IS copyrighted and wholesale copying and re-posting as your own information will not be tolerated. No one pays for this compilation but me - and those generous
folks who support it using the PayPal button above! Thanks! If it is helpful
to you, credit would be appreciated! (And please also credit the original
data providers, usually the EIA.) No absolute guarantees as to accuracy --
but every effort has been made to be reasonably correct. Corrections appreciated! - but please explore for the answer first!

Why don't I have everything updated using the most recent data? Because I have to make a living, and with all the changes going on I'd do nothing but update this page. All the data are out there for anyone to find - I don't have a secret source. Explore the EIA Web Site.

A note about numbers:

You'll see statistics like those posted here that may be substantially different. You need to be aware of what you are comparing. Is it just crude oil production, importation, or consumption? Or is it crude + "natural gas liquids"? Or maybe it includes petroleum products, such as refined gasoline. Numbers do change from month to month and year to year, of course. Are you looking at Russia, or the Former Soviet Union (which includes Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and other independent nations)? Is the percentage you find the percentage of consumption, or the percentage of imports? There are many, many different ways of looking at data. Just be aware.

Personal note about bias: When this page started, in 1996, it really was mostly "interesting oil statistics" - largest fields and so on. It has evolved, as my personal interests and those of the page's viewers have evolved, to be a hodgepodge of information about a lot of complex things. I have tried VERY HARD to make this page be objective and free of bias - but it is done by a human being, and it is impossible to remove all my bias, even though as a scientist (geologist) I try to do that.

By way of background, in the late 1990s I really thought the "peak oil" people were crazy, or at least "doomsayers" and pessimists. Oil exploration people (like me) tend to be optimistic - you have to be, since you fail so often. But in the past 5 to 7 years, I've come to feel, largely through creating this compilation, that the "peak oil" people are a lot closer to right than are the "sweetness-and-light-and-nothing-is-really-wrong" crowd. I don't KNOW that - but based on what I can see and read with my own eyes, there is little question that Americans' oil guzzling will bring us to a fall, likely sooner rather than later. So, there, now you know my bias. Read this page with that in mind - but please also know that I still am trying very hard to keep it as objective as possible.